Promoting parental compliance with home infant apnea monitor use

OBJECTIVE: To promote greater compliance in using prescribed infant apnea monitors among families with a medically at-risk infant. Eight consecutively referred non-compliant families were treated by a medical social worker who provided educational, behavioral prompting, and case management services. In six families results were evaluated with A-B single case research designs, and in two families A-B-A designs were used. Enhanced compliance followed intervention with all eight families. Clinically satisfactory compliance permitting the pediatrician to safely discontinue monitor use occurred in five of the eight families. Simple behavioral and case management interventions show great promise in promoting caregiver compliance with using home-based infant apnea monitors.     

Plantinga’s Reformed Epistemology: What’s the Question?

Alvin Plantingas Warranted Christian Belief is without questionone of the central texts of the Reformed epistemology movement. Critiques of Plantingas defence have been both multiple and varied. As varied as these responses are, however, it is my contention that many of them amount to the same thing. It is the purpose of this paper to offer an overview of the main lines of attack that have been directed as Plantingas project, and thereafter to show how many, if not most, of these objections can be understood as versions or aspects of the same criticism, what I call the Inadequacy Thesis.     

The relationship of body image dissatisfaction to cigarette smoking in college students

This study examined the association of cigarette smoking status and body image dissatisfaction as measured by the Multidimensional Body-Self Relations Questionnaire (MBSRQ), in 1575 young adult college students, 18–24 years of age. Respondents were current cigarette smokers (N = 482) or never tobacco users (N = 1093). Smoking status was found to be significantly associated with 5 of the 10 MBSRQ subscales, with current smokers having lower scores on Fitness Orientation, Health Evaluation and Health Orientation (all p < 0.001) and higher scores on Appearance Orientation (p = 0.01) and Overweight Preoccupation (p = 0.03) compared with never tobacco users. Furthermore, among current smokers, a higher number of days smoked in the last 30 days were associated with lower scores on all MBSRQ subscales, except Self-Classified Weight. In terms of clinical implications, interventions for smoking cessation among college students might benefit from inclusion of components for addressing body image dissatisfaction and improving health beliefs.     

The norms and stability of new measures of the multidimensional body image construct

The measurement of the body image construct has become increasingly multidimensional. New assessments are available to measure various facets of body image functioning: The Body Image Disturbance Questionnaire, Appearance Schemas Inventory-Revised, Body Image Coping Strategies Inventory, and Body Image Quality of Life Inventory. The present article reports normative data and acceptable internal reliabilities across seven completed investigations using these measures with female and male college students. Sex differences were examined and found, as expected, for most of the measures. In addition, a study evaluated an undetermined but essential psychometric property of these facets of the construct—their test–retest reliability. In a sample of 107 college students, the 2-week stability of these measures was found to be acceptable. Several directions for future research with these assessments are identified.     

Adolescent personality: a five-factor model construct validation

The purpose of this study was to investigate convergent and discriminant validity of the five-factor model of adolescent personality in a school setting using three different raters (methods): self-ratings, peer ratings, and teacher ratings. The authors investigated validity through a multitrait-multimethod matrix and a confirmatory factor analysis correlated trait, uncorrelated method model. With the exception of Emotional Stability, each analysis demonstrated similar patterns and together provided support for the convergent and discriminant validity of the five-factor model structure of adolescent personality. However, among the three raters, self-ratings of personality provided a comparatively weaker method for assessing adolescent personality. The influences of agreement between self and other raters are discussed in relation to contrast, perceiver, and target effects; expert observer effects; the degree of acquaintanceship; and the effect of the social context.     

A role for CS-US contingency in Pavlovian conditioning

Two experiments evaluated the role of conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus (CS-US) contingency in appetitive Pavlovian conditioning in rats. In both experiments, some groups received a positively contingent CS signaling an increased likelihood of the US relative to the absence of the CS. These groups were compared with control treatments in which the likelihood of the US was the same in the presence and absence of the CS. A trial marker served as a trial context. Experiment 1 found contingency sensitivity. There was a reciprocal relationship between responding to the CS and the trial marker. Experiment 2 showed that this result was not stimulus or response specific. These results are consistent with associative explanations and the idea that rats are sensitive to CS-US contingency.     

Test-retest reliability of fMRI during nonverbal semantic decisions in moderate-severe nonfluent aphasia patients

Cortical reorganization in poststroke aphasia is not well understood. Few studies have investigated neural mechanisms underlying language recovery in severe aphasia patients, who are typically viewed as having a poor prognosis for language recovery. Although test-retest reliability is routinely demonstrated during collection of language data in single-subject aphasia research, this is rarely examined in fMRI studies investigating the underlying neural mechanisms in aphasia recovery. The purpose of this study was to acquire fMRI test-retest data examining semantic decisions both within and between two aphasia patients. Functional MRI was utilized to image individuals with chronic, moderate-severe nonfluent aphasia during nonverbal, yes/no button-box semantic judgments of iconic sentences presented in the Computer-assisted Visual Communication (C-ViC) program. We investigated the critical issue of intra-subject reliability by exploring similarities and differences in regions of activation during participants' performance of identical tasks twice on the same day. Each participant demonstrated high intra-subject reliability, with response decrements typical of task familiarity. Differences between participants included greater left hemisphere perilesional activation in the individual with better response to C-ViC training. This study provides fMRI reliability in chronic nonfluent aphasia, and adds to evidence supporting differences in individual cortical reorganization in aphasia recovery.     

Smoking withdrawal dynamics: II. Improved tests of withdrawal-relapse relations

In this article, the authors assessed whether continuously scaled symptom parameters derived from growth models (T. M. Piasecki et al., 2003) are linked to smoking at long-term follow-up by using data from a large-scale clinical trial (N = 893). Results revealed that higher withdrawal intercepts, positive linear slopes, and greater volatility were all positively associated with relapse, and cigarette coefficients (indicating smoking-induced withdrawal reduction) were negatively related to relapse. In models keyed around the first lapse to smoking, those destined to lapse reported more severe withdrawal during abstinence, and withdrawal patterns discriminated groups defined according to lapse duration. The findings complement earlier heterogeneity studies in implicating the pattern of changing withdrawal symptoms over time as a factor strongly associated with smoking relapse.